Project: Fast and INtuitive Data Retrieval

Acronym	FINDR (Reference Number: 862669)
Duration	01/02/2021 - 31/07/2023
Project Topic	The United Nations (UN) predict that global food consumption will increase by about 50% in 2050, despite water scarcity, without more arable land, and under changing climatic conditions. To prevent a global agricultural break-down in our highly interconnected world with its complex food chain, we need to address this challenge on a global scale. Our capability to do so is directly connected to our ability to monitor crop health: globally, at field level, and on time scales relevant to temporal trends. In view of a total global agricultural area of around 1.5 billion hectares, the only applicable solution is satellite-based Earth Observation (EO). Since primary food producers (PFPs) cannot directly benefit from EO data, they heavily depend on value added service providers (VASPs) to provide satellite-based applications and services derived from EO sources. VASPs provide insight into crop health and water demands for PFP as well as support political leaders in responding to crisis, making the VASP layer vital to agriculture. However, with a growing amount of not intercompatible data and an increasing number of data providers, this becomes a progressively complex task. In this project, we develop the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform FINDR to provide universal, transparent, and unified access to EO data critical for sustainable and resilient food production in the agri-food sector. It offers a comprehensive and transparent overview of available data from all major EO providers to enable faster and better-informed decision making. Furthermore, it enables accurate near-future forecasts on data availability to manage data ingestion and a homogenization approach to allow for obstacle-free integration of EO data from different providers. This will support closing coverage gaps in existing and future information products. Once implemented, FINDR will be tested on field-level together with an end user by the consortium’s VASP. A startup ensures the commercialization and continuous development of FINDR beyond the project duration. We expect FINDR to benefit existing applications with increased data availability, reduced maintenance and integration effort and to boost VASP uptake for EO data by reducing interfacing effort, considerably reducing entry barriers for new applications.
Project Results (after finalisation)	The project’s overall objective is to provide universal, transparent, and unified access to EO data critical for sustainable and resilient food production in the agri-food sector. The following objectives will be addressed: ● Creation of a comprehensive and transparent overview of available data from all major existing EO systems enabling faster and better-informed decisions, ● Provision of accurate near-future forecasts on data availability to timely react to and mitigate potential coverage gaps by use of alternative data sources, ● Obstacle-free integration of EO data from different sources to spatiotemporally complement existing and future information products. We will achieve the objectives by the implementation of an ICT platform called FINDR , which provides easy access to EO data, to be used in precision farming applications, meeting the following requirements: ● Accessibility: equal access to free and commercial EO data portals ○ Transparency: clarity of data availability including sources, costs, quality, and time frame (past and future) ○ Visualization: clear and concise data presentation facilitating selection of the data best fitting the user’s needs ● Usability: data integration into existing applications and services from VASPs ○ Automatization: programmable search, access, and processing of source data ○ Quality: unified quality assessment of data ○ Homogenization: integration of various sources for spatiotemporal complementation of information products
Website	visit project website
Network	ICT-AGRI-FOOD
Call	1st ICT-AGRI-FOOD Joint Cofund Call

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, EMI	Coordinator	Germany
2	German Centre for Geosciences (GFZ)	Partner	Germany
3	eLEAF B.V.	Partner	Netherlands
4	ACC Cyfronet AGH	Partner	Poland